


Here's Flowers for You

by noun



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: DAficswap, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-22 09:17:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13163901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noun/pseuds/noun
Summary: Blackwall makes use of an Orlesian code, Josephine responds in kind.A gift for DA Fic Swap '17





	Here's Flowers for You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gallicenae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gallicenae/gifts).



In Orlais, you can send a message in a posy. It does not need to be one of romance. Duels have been called and lives ended over the delivery of a daffodil, an affair revealed and a family sunk into shame with a few sprigs of dill.

It has been in fashion for as long as Orlais has played at games, clever and opulent and pointed as anything else in that country, and he acquired a bit of it when he was younger, traveling through Orlais. He had written Liddy about it, sent page-thin flowers he’d pressed in books with thick writing in the corners of his letters to spell out the meanings for her—daisies for gentleness and elderflower for enthusiasm—and watched chevaliers open their post from home with similarly flattened flowers spilling out; the only bouquet able to survive the trip to the front.

Josephine is a learned woman, clever enough to understand diplomacy in any tongue it might be presented to her. Blackwall is from Cumberland, but that he might have wandered through Orlais while recruiting and picked up a few errant meanings isn’t out of the question—and they are also, now, despite the denials Josephine herself pens, a thoroughly Orlesian organization.

Led by a Dalish who has emphasized, repeatedly, that he doesn’t give a horse’s ass about the Chantry, and has been found to turn as red as those markings on his face when someone calls him ‘Andraste’s Chosen’.

—but for his purposes, Orlesian enough that when they’re in the Hinterlands, and Mahanon bends to pick yet another few leaves of Elfroot, he himself takes the time to knick some of the ferns growing nearby. Seeker Pentaghast gives him a Look but does not challenge him, and that night, he presses it in the bottom of his back and saves it for later.

From Ferelden, holly. From the market square in Halamshiral, gladiolus, which prove hard to press just right. The spines on the holly tear at the delicate, tissue-thin dried flowers. And, finally, from Skyhold’s gardens, mint.

It overpowers the other blossoms, and he is disappointed, but he strings them together none the less. He was never a fair hand in this, but he considers it reasonable enough, and leaves it on her desk, atop the stack of letters she will attend to once she comes down from the meeting with the Templar, the Lady Seeker, and the Nightingale. Her guards see him enter, and see him leave, but he is no threat, only a knight (of sorts) gifting a lady (quite certainly) with a chivalrous little gift. 

Her response is of live flowers, and a week later, placed in the stables while he was fetching more water from the well.

Violets, rosemary, yarrow, and little yellow blossoms an Antivan groom tells him is a coronilla. Those he must reference the meaning of, but there are suddenly a great many books about floriography in Skyhold’s library.

He reads, and thinks that he might well soon overtake Mahanon’s reputation for collecting samples in the field.


End file.
